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Clean Up Towering Pines (or Not)! A Newspaper Editorial |
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A tornado touched down in Hammond on June 20, with tragic results. No residents were injured. Very little private property incurred substantial damage. However, Towering Pines, the wilderness preserve owned and maintained by the town, was largely destroyed.
The tornado was, according to all weather experts in the area, an anomaly, meteorologically speaking. “Tornadoes are rarely, if ever seen in New England,” says Captain Maria Hinojosa of the New England Weather Bureau. “The Hammond tornado was like a blizzard in Mississippi, or a drought in Seattle. It wasn’t impossible. But it is one of those things that reminds you that weather is entirely unpredictable."
The storm was the result of a low-pressure system that settled over the Northeast earlier that day. Nearly all western Connecticut counties were placed under a tornado watch during the early evening. In Hammond, the skies darkened dramatically around 5 P.M. According to the New England Weather Bureau, at 5:18 P.M., a tornado of considerable power touched down three miles south of downtown, in the Towering Pines wilderness preserve. By 5:30, the tornado had dissipated, and the storm that brought it had moved north and east of town.
Several other tornadoes were sighted in the region, most of them in the Housatonic River Valley. State officials report that only the tornado in Hammond caused severe damage.
Michael Kelly, one of the many local volunteers who helps manage and maintain Towering Pines, toured the destruction the following day. He estimates that nearly seventy percent of the trees in the preserve were either severely damaged or felled by the storm. “The only word to describe the damage is catastrophic,” he said. “In less than twenty minutes, that tornado tore down trees that had been standing for more than 200 years.”
Estelle Longman, another volunteer at the preserve, said that after she toured the destruction, she began crying. “It looked like one of those photos from the west, showing what happens when timber companies clear-cut an entire valley. The tornado couldn’t have done much more damage than it did. The old trees were lying around in all directions, some of them crossed on top of each other. It looked like someone had spilled a box of chopsticks all across the floor.”
Kelly suspects that many of the trees that are still standing will fall during the next year. “Next winter, a lot of those trees are going to topple. The ice will get inside of those cracks and just expand and expand. One ice storm will finish off about half of what’s left. Maybe even more.”
Local officials don’t yet know what course of action they’ll recommend for the preserve. As Mayor Robert Allison explained the day after the tornado, the town needs to find out how much it will cost to clean up the destruction. “But before that happens, we have to decide exactly how one ’cleans up’ a wilderness preserve that has been altered by wholly natural causes."
"The environmental engineers we hired to survey the damage tell us that the fallen trees don’t pose an immediate risk to health or safety,” continues Mayor Allison. These consultants, Landscape Systems of Boston, Massachusetts, will submit a final report to the town in several weeks. Mayor Allison says that the town can’t make a final decision until this report is submitted. However, he explains, the “initial findings indicate that while the fire risk is slightly higher than it was when the trees are standing, it’s not so high as to be alarming."
Mayor Allison encourages residents of Hammond to visit the preserve and see the destruction for themselves. “We need to come together as a town,” he says. “In 1968, we decided to protect this preserve with our own energy and resources. That was a landmark decision. Now we need to make a similar kind of decision. In the next few months, we need to use our minds and hearts to determine what’s the best thing for Towering Pines and the town of Hammond."
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